Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S) seems to be on the mend from a perception standpoint. CEO Dan Hesse is still running television advertisements with his direct email address and a personal message to potential Sprint subscribers. The cellular carrier has a refined, electric image and has a decent competitor to Apple, Inc.'s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone. Is it still in bad financial shape? That answer would be yes, as it continues to lose customers every single quarter.While a Sprint/T-Mobile partnership was rumored this summer, the technology used between the two companies is incompatible. From a layman's perspective, it's precisely the problem that doomed the Sprint acquisition of Nextel. To this day, the brands still operate independently in many ways. That's been a death knell for the company, while larger competitor AT&T, Inc. (NYSE: T) perfectly merged its network with the now-gone Cingular over a few years. Still, would T-Mobile really want to team up with Sprint? Only if Sprint jettisons the Nextel brand and network sometime in 2008.
Analyst Christopher Larsen with Credit Suisse makes a decent argument for Sprint and Nextel parting ways as soon as possible, citing the recent $3 billion fund raiser Sprint announced. Could an impending corporate divorce be in the works? Sprint has already written off tens of billions in the bungled Nextel merger, but it could raise over $7.5 billion by selling Nextel.
Still, with the third- and fourth-largest wireless players (Sprint and T-Mobile, respectively) ripe for consolidation, combining two very different networks better work if there's even a hint of a future combination between the two. But right now, that may be the only choice: Verizon Wireless and AT&T are kicking butt in the wireless market in the U.S.











Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-28-2008 @ 12:37PM
beanspants said...
that's not his regular corporate email address that he gives in the commericals and by that I mean that potential subscriber emails won't be mixed in with regular business emails from the CFO.
8-28-2008 @ 4:30PM
Daniel said...
Sprint is just going to eliminate the Nextel frequencies and make everyone change to the new Qchat technology which operates one hundred precent on the Sprint network. No more nextel or hybrid phones.
8-28-2008 @ 5:23PM
Gary said...
It won't matter what sprint does with T-Mobile or anyone else untill they find a way to treat their customers better. The way their customer service people treat the customer gets a F on my grading system. In fairness, it should be said that if Sprint didn't treat their workers with such disdain then perhaps you might get someone on the phone who actually cares whether a customer is satisfied at the end of the call. I recently heard that Sprint Changed the qualifiers at the end of a bonus period for some of their contracted call centers so that those people who had worked hard to achieve their numbers ( and had ) were told that they wern't going to get their bonuses because they ( Sprint ) had decided to change how they were going to count qualifying days. I am not surprised. Is it a wonder you can't get someone who cares what happens to the customer? This won't change by dumping Nextel or merging with T-Mobile. When will people understand that it is the Corporate attitude that is killing the company.
8-29-2008 @ 1:54AM
Gatorjk said...
Sprint is driving the business into the ground. First by collapsing the customer service it wasn’t great before, but made it worse. Getting rid of “problem” customers instead of trying to solve the problems, yes, I know some people are hard to please. Instead of getting some money from a customer, they wanted all or nothing…they opted for nothing at all…upsetting the customer and having very bad public relations causing more customers to leave.
They bred uncertainty and doubt among employees about the future of Sprint Nextel and their jobs., along with poor treatment of their employees. I feel when an employee is treated well and feels good about the company they work for this is a good reflection to other people that hey it looks like a good company to work for. If they treat their employees well then they must treat their customers good too. This is good public relations, good press and positive reflection about the company.
Then it was decided to do a reduction in force (lay offs) to save a buck. Let’s layoff employees cause more negative press about Sprint Nextel (Hey they don’t care about employees then they must not care about customers.) Let’s see if they saved any moneys, they laid off 10,000 employees, continue to pay them severance…then some of them sued Sprint on a class action… lets see they had to pay millions, I think they're still in litigations. They also lost customers, when former employees related their story about the layoffs and treatment. (in my case at least four people canceled their Nextel service that were not relatives) .
I would love to see Tim Donahue back in the driver seat, I personally met and spoke to the gentleman, he seemed to be a very down to earth and caring person. Another person that would get my vote would be Craig McCaw.
What they should do is bring back excellent local Customer Care and Technical Support Field Engineers to resolve customer issues. Instead of doing a RIF of employees, they should have absorbed them into new positions in the Xohm WiMax project (Xohm worst name since MicroSoft’s Zune). Sprint should also sharpen the focus and forge ahead with WiMax. They say they are poring money into it, but they are not really moving ahead very fast. They decided to partner with Clearwire, but it is wishy washy alliance still. What Sprint needs to do is start building the system out now, not waiting to see what others are doing and seeing which is going to be the standard. They need to BE the standard that all others are measured. Like Nextel’s Direct Connect all others try to compare theirs with iDEN. Trying to reduce the latency or increase the speed as compared to the iDEN System. To be fair I haven't used CDMA Qchat I can't give it a fair comparison. What I heard it's quick, but not fast enough...I don't know...
What they need to do is spin the Nextel iDEN System into another company focused and dedicated to its customers. Motorola should continue to manufacture dual mode iDEN CDMA phones. With all this talk about 800 MHz rebanding and 700 MHz Public Safety Network.. Maybe they should work harder to “sell” the iDEN system to the government developing it National network for the government and first responders. Later adding 700
As far as I'm concerned, Sprint ruined Nextel. I worked for Nextel for 10 years, yes they had their problems, but at least they were employee and customer focused. About a year before the merger, I noticed that the culture was changing, Nextel started to assimilate itself to Sprint unbeknown to us they were in negotiations with Sprint at the time. Once the merger happened they trashed customer service and technical support Sprint started to treat employees and customers poorly, then the lay offs happened...not a good thing for a company to do if they are trying to build itself up...very bad reflection for a company...bad rep...
I don't think it would be a good Idea to have T-mobile buy it, unless they are going to kill Sprint off completely and just use the resources to build out their GSM network...Oh, by the way iDEN is actually a GSM system with the proprietary dispatch overlay...I know Europe is trying to implement a GSM dispatch system maybe if they go that way so they can add dispatch to their GSM system...who knows???
It would make better sense to have Verizon purchase Sprint, integrate the CDMA (Sprint already roams on to Verizon system and visa versa when necessary) and spin off the Nextel iDEN system
8-29-2008 @ 6:47AM
RS said...
here are a few of the e mail addresses I have collecteDaniel.R.Hesse@sprint.com, ecare@cc.sprintpcs.com, executive.offices@sprint.com, Karen.Paletta@sprint.com, KarenPaletta@sprint.com, Keith.Cowan@sprint.com, laura.porter@sprint.com, online@sprint.com, Robert.Stedman@sprint.comd in my quest to get answers and to get the coverage back in my area that I once had.